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[Edlio Webinar] Mass Communication

Added Mar 18, 2021 •

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Please enjoy this 30-minute webinar where we highlight best practices for pushing important communication to your entire school community through your Edlio site!

Show Transcript

Hello everyone! Welcome to today's webinar. Thank you very much for meeting us today and we're going to be talking about mass communication. That means, and let me exit my presentation to show you two slides in particular. In this case I want to first let you know about a few quick tips that I recommend when it comes to mass communication and in this case have in mind that one of the great advantages that we have at Edlio is it you have multiple channels to hit one message with different options. You can use them combined or by themselves whatever is your preference. In this case specifically we're going to hit all channels with only one message. So you have News and Announcements that is that you're hopefully using more regularly. You also have Social Media Manager. If you haven't already integrated with it, please go to the Help Center, look out for Social Media, and there's going to be a very thorough article about how you can connect your accounts when it comes to Twitter and Facebook. Homepage alerts-- or Pop-up Alerts-- as we call them. Broadcasts-- this is one of our newest features. It's an add-on of product right now. For some schools, we have it on a trial version so check it out and see if that's something you would be interested in terms of using voice, text, and email. Of course the email sender and app alerts. In this case it's School News App by Edlio. It's one-way communication parent app and in this case we will be able to let parents know about calendar events and alerts specifically. So these are the channels specifically that are at your disposal. So now, when it comes to the communication, this is where I really encourage you to take time in planning ahead because designing your communication campaign definitely needs time so you know and understand better what is the message that you want to convey, what is it that we want to say to parents. What is it going to mean in this case to find the core of your message. Once you know that then you will create everything around it. Then you will provide context, the details. Give clear instructions. Sometimes we forget that parents are not part of the staff of the school, right? During those cases we assume that they know what we're referring when it comes to fill out a form but we don't tell them what is the form about, why do they need to fill it out, if there's going to be a deadline, the purpose behind it, etc... And then we ask ourselves why aren't we engaging with our community. So provide them clear information about that. Define the elements that you're going to be using, and by elements I refer to, for example, if you're going to post it as news, not only as an alert. If you're also going to be using forms, in which in this case we're going to be using one to show you how you can combine things. What else is that you're going to be using to create those elements and then prepare to deliver your message. Create the text for each channel. Sometimes we post the same message all over the place but you will see that for example when it comes to newsletter definitely you will need to put more information. However if you're only posting this to the School News App, you will only need one or two sentences to convey the message because then they will be able to go to your home page and see the rest of the article, so have that in mind and use different information. Sometimes you don't need to say as much depending on the channel that you're using. And always, my last is the biggest recommendation actually, less is more. Keep it consistent and easy for your users. Don't make so much of it the text that they don't understand but not so few that they're missing all the important parts of it. Now that we have clarity about these recommendations, let's jump into an example and we're going to be working today on our test site. This is our admin site and I'm going to be toggling between the admin site and our homepage where we're going to see different things. For today, our example is going to be our message is going to be about volunteering. I have a page here on COVID that is actually, and this is part of the elements that I was saying before. In advance I created this page because I want parents to be part of the volunteer team and that's going to happen because I've already created this page. Imagine that in this paragraph I'm beginning to explain what the volunteer team is doing, what's the mission behind it and then I'm showcasing last year's activities. Just a few of them, going to hide them and be a part of the team and then actually letting them know to be part of this amazing team with more information about it and when they click on this inside page, this is the second element. This is the form. We are using one of our out-of-the-box PTA volunteer registration forms that we have. So I just typed in more details that the new school year is here, participate and if you have more questions contact and the person who is going to be taking care of their questions and pretty straightforward out of the box. I just did a fix here and there for example in terms of the grade personalized instead of the submit button I could put "Count me in" and you know you can customize this. We have another recorded webinar when it comes to forms. Look out for it and you will see how I created this specific PTA form. Now this is what I want to convey when it comes to mass communication so let's get started with that. Now let me go back to our homepage to have it ready and in this case from the admin site, you know already that you have on your left quick links or quick access to our most common features. Of course News + Alerts is the most important one that many of the schools use a lot. So you can click on here and you will be redirected to the specific page of news and alerts. Versus if you click on News what you will see is that you're going to be redirected specifically to the window that you're going to just be filling out information for that specific news. Another way that you have to access News + Alerts is by going on to the left hamburger menu and from there, go to Announce, and News + Alerts. By the way from here is where you will find most of or actually all of our Mass Communication channels. We have News + Alerts you have perhaps you would like to also put something on the spotlight, Broadcast, App Alerts, for the School News App, Email Sender, the Social Media Manager and of course everything is going to be the source of information is going to be the contact list that you create based on whatever needs you have-- by group, by staff, by parents-- you name it, right? You could create a volunteer list and create a contact list for that and then you will be sending a specific information once you have all your parents that are going to be part of it. So this is a quick way to hit different or individual channels if you like and what we're going to do right now is just to show you I'm going to go to the main window of News and Alerts you know your way around it. From here you will see what are the categories you want to be using. If you want to add in this case we're going to click on and "Add News" Now for the purpose of time I've created previous text so I'm going to be copy-pasting and this is the greatest adantage if you follow the recommendation to plan in advance because as you're going to see right now what I'm going to start doing is actually copy pasting from the text that I already created. Remember our goal with this communication campaign is to invite parents to be part of our volunteer team so our headline is going to be "It's Time to Volunteer!" and also here it comes with the consistency. The page mentions it's time to volunteer that headline is the same because I want to leave those sort of bread crumbs for them to find their way and it's going to be more intuitive if I do so and they're going to understand that I'm talking about the same thing. Now you can put in your summary. Some schools put the same headline in their summary. That is not the intention. This is the breadcrumb part. You start saying you need volunteers then you say that you want them to be part of a team that's essentially the message that you're giving more a bit more information along the way. Now when it comes to content we also have another paragraph that we going to paste here and this is where I give a little bit more information throughout the years, our wonderful parents, now it's your turn, right? This is where I'm going to be using and show you because you have options to do some editing. Remember you can do the bolding, hyperlink, center, align, even add a picture if you want. So in this case maybe if you're copy pasting from somewhere else and you want to be consistent with the font of your site, I recommend clicking on the three buttons/options that you have here and clear the formatting. That way, if in case for for example, you were using some bolding or some other coloring this will be removing it. Now it's your turn. Fill out this form and join our squad volunteer team. When you're using different features my recommendation is to and let me duplicate and open a new tab to show you how I would do that. In this case it's at form, so I'm going to go back to our admin site from here I'm going to go to our forms section and you're going to see that I already created this. is the volunteer PTA volunteer registration form. I'm not going to go into the details because it's not the intention of this webinar. However, click on the three dots, click on share and you will see hyperlink. Click on it. You got it. Close it and go back. If you want, you can leave it I'm not going to use it anymore and I don't want to have many tabs open I'm just going to discard it. Now that I have that hyperlink, I'm going to put it's time to and here is where I'm going to put my hyperlink. Select the text that you want, click on hyperlink, paste and now you can choose to change the text that is going to be displayed or leave it as is. Now you can choose if you want to open it in a new tab or in the same. My recommendation is always open it in a new tab that way you will allow parents to come back to the original information. Let's click save and now you see that it is hyperlinked. Perfect. That's what I wanted You always have the option if you're using additional sources to put the information here maybe you could also put the hyperlink of the form in this case but for me it works better to be part of the text that I'm using as at the top. Now let's add a beautiful picture that I already had and this is where again being and being prepared in advance is where it's going to work a lot. Let's use this one I like it better. Remember, every time that you see orange, it's an alert that something's missing. In this case we're missing the alt text because we are really concerned about ADA compliance that's why we encourage you to use it. We're only going to use one picture in this case and now you know that you can post it later or post it now and this is where you can plan in advance you have so many things on your plate on a daily basis so if you start doing this today on Wednesday but it's something you'll use next week then you can use "Post Later" but you already have it there. So think about that and how you can be more productive and work better with your time. For the sake of the example, I'm going to post now and we're going to hit save Perfect! That is already on the homepage now here is where the mass communication comes along. When you have connected your social media, just click here, select if you want to post it on Facebook or Twitter done. Second mass communication pop-up alerts in this case we're going to use it. We're going to choose that we want to post it today but in this case it's going to be 1 PM and we're going to Save Post and we see that it's already there and I'm going to show you how it looks. You can always turn it off or you can add it and rearrange the dates and times whenever you need. Now when it comes to and let me show you how it looks. Let me do a couple hard refreshes on our home page and there you go! This is the pop-up alert that's quick as that if they want they can say okay but if they want to learn more this is where it they would see part of the information, the picture if they click on the link it's going to send them directly to the form that we previously created Now maybe you would also want them to share about the page so you would add another line and put something around the lines like if you want to learn more about our program read this page and you would put this Volunteer Page so they would read more about it. So you see how you can connect and interlink everything. That's the beauty behind it. So let's go back to our homepage. So we already posted on social media, you know how to do pop-up alerts. Now Broadcasts-- this is great because in this case it's imporant but not a crucial message. If it were me a crucial message would be school closed, winter's coming, just coming something that it's like urgent. Broadcasts-- it's quick, fast, three channels hit in one. In this case we have email, text, and voice. You can see because we created these from the news feature it's already populating basic information-- the same subject, it's time to volunteer. You can choose if you want to send it to very specific channels. Let's say for example because it's not something so urgent I just want them to know by email and text. You're going to see the difference when it comes to the email used on Broadcasts, it's for quick mass communication. You're not interested in putting the picture and putting more explanations around things-- just a quick and efficient communication. When we're using, and you're going to see the difference, when we use email sender there is where you can put more information, paragraphs to the layout that you want because you want to give more about the topic that you're talking about. In this case we're going to leave it with only email and text we're going to hit continue. Our basic or default language is English but you can choose maybe your community is more towards Spanish, you would use Spanish as the default but in this case is going to be English and we're going to be sending the email. In this case it's going to be myself, you see again it's populating the information, time to volunteer, it's already putting the information that I want. Be part of our amazing volunteer team and I don't have to do much unless that I want to I could start typing, editing, and adding a few more things maybe if I wanted, here is where I would put that on the link on the inside page that I had mentioned but for now I'm going to leave it like that. They're going to be able to click on the whole story. This is how you will redirect to your homepage and encourage them to visit. If you want you can add translation. Let's put in this case Spanish. Once it starts translating in the meantime let's see how it looks. It says [en español] [en español] If you don't like it too much- the translation-- then you can just put in a little bit. [en español] It makes a little more sense if I'm going to say it in Spanish. I'll leave it like that. Again you can do some editing by language. When it comes to the text portion, you can leave it brief and short. Be part of our amazing volunteer team the story, and I will always recommend to leave this automatic note-- Reply STOP to opt-out it's important to let parents opt out. Of course if they do they will stop receiving all information that comes with the Broadcast so explain that to them before they opt out but they have that possibility. You will always have the number of characters available when it comes to the different channels, so you can have also that in mind and in this case let's see it's going to be the same and I'm going to do the same edits to stay consistent and leave it up there and hit enter. Okay. Good to go. Let's hit continue. And of course right now it's taking more time because I'm doing all the explanation but once you get the hang of it you'll start clicking very quickly and you'll see the benefit of just with one use mass communication. Now it's time to enter our contacts. You can choose by adding them if you already have a first parents, this is the contact list, so that's why it's important that you have it already created. You can cherry pick as many as you want or you can search. Let's start typing, hit enter and then you will see that here is my name. I'm going to send it over only to me because I don't want all the company so let's do it like that and hit add. Now it's time it's time and you can also do it manually. If you know the names that you're looking for, you can also add them manually. Now, you have sort of a brief resume of what you're doing you're sending an email to one person how many units are remaining so you're good to go. The same goes with text, how many users are going to be sending it over and how many units you have. Send now. I'm ready to send. And that's it! You're going to have the confirmation. Now let me show you how that looks when it comes to and let's go back to the admin site so we already sent a broadcast now let me show you when it comes to sending App Alerts. In this case, you see that it's already pulling the same information you can change the text if you want, you can see the remaining characters, the link is the one that is going to be based on the news that you're going to be posting so I'm good with that and hit send. That's it! By this time, if you go onto our Edlio College Prep School News App, refresh, and you will see the app alert already there. So let's close this one to have a cleaner look. Now here is the difference with email sender.Remember that when we had Broadcast, let me go Broadcast and show you this example. Now this is the "It's time to volunteer." You're going to see the summary, who did you send it to, the status, etc... Now when it comes to text, the person you're sending it to and the email let's see and this is how in this case obviously in the previous example I did send it to a voice, text, and email so this is how you would see the difference between them and now let me go back and show you how it will look with the Email Sender and the difference is you remember when it came to Broadcast it only was two sentences basically sweet and short Now the beauty with Email Sender is that you can do a lot more in terms of content. Let's say for example that we want to change the layout. We're going to do this one, hit continue. We're going to be using some text that we already had and you can see that I'm selecting the area where the text is going to go. This other text when it comes to events I'm going to be adding events. Let's say I also want to tell them about the welcome to PTA meeting. Those are the events that I'm going to be adding and when it comes to the news, "It's time to volunteer." This is my news. I don't have to do anything and I'm just missing-- we'll put some text here-- more text at the bottom. Always you have the chance to do some editing, hit continue. Who are going to be your recipients? You can do a CSS if you don't have your contact list you can download our CSVs and you can add them manually as I'm doing right now. In this case, what is going to be my message, keep it consistent, "It's time to volunteer." And this is the pamphlet that I chose. If you want to be sure what you're using and now let's hit send. We want to hit send right now. So let's hit send. You'll have a confirmation and you will see that it was delivered. Now let me show you before we run out of time, a few examples of how it looks once a parent receives an email.This is the email. This is how it will look, your school logo, the text that I inputted, the different events that I chose, more texts and this is our news. Obviously you can add more if you want and if I click on more it will send me to our homepage to that specific news and I will read more about it, yes I'm interested. Then I would click on the form, I would register, and that's it. That is how sweet and short and fast you can use App Alerts and all our mass communication . So just doing a quick summary of what we did basically once we had our message which was, "It's time to volunteer." We wanted to invite parents to it. We had our text. Then we went to News and Alerts and it was easy because we already had our elements, our text, the forms and everything that we were using it's very fast for you to hit multiple channels at once and this is great also for some sort of emergency. Sometimes you definitely don't have time to go and login into Facebook and then go into log into Twitter and then come here and then create a print version of an email and send it to and give it to parents. This is why we want to you to have everything under one umbrella. Multiple channels to use individually or in this case as you learn today, you can pull them all together with one goal in mind. Let me close all these windows and let me show you. So this is a pop-up alert. We already see it. If I scroll down and do a couple refreshes to be sure that the news + announcement is there. You see now you have it on your homepage. This is the image that we added when I click on it, it's going to be the information that I already showed you. You already seen how it looks on an email and when it comes to school and we're running out of time but you would see basically the same information when it comes to the news. So as easy as that is how you can do mass communication take advantage of all our communication channels that we have at your disposal. If you have any questions please let us know and you will know that you can always contact us. You have at the top-right, the help button when you click on a help center here is where you're going to see if you want to, let's say for example, and show you with this is webinar that I was telling you about, Forms, if you want to learn how we created that form here, you can look at it and learn more about it or let's say for example you want the steps 1 through 3 on how to create forms. Hit enter and you will see that it will send you to specific articles the overview you can learn everything and so much from our Help Center. Another way that you can learn or if you need help troubleshooting, contact Edlio Support. Ask Sergio, our Tech Support Person that helped me out today. He's part of the team. So any questions that you have you can call them, you can create a case, and of course your Client Success Specialist like myself, Liliana Perez, are always willing to receive any of your email and have the specific sessions with you to strategize about communication and also help you out in terms of usage requirements. Thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate you being with us and I hope to see you on the next webinar. Thank you very much!

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